The other day I was going for a walk in Dormont, PA and encountered what I considered to be a very bad set of stairs. They sat on a steep hill, and as you can see in the photo below, there’s a peculiar design to them.  

Aside from looking ugly, they were also very very very uncomfortable to walk down on. But I was more curious about why they were designed this way. I mean surely someone would have pointed out how unergonomic they were during the construction.

I decided to look into this because I found it to be somewhat fascinating. When I first showed this to one of my friends, she suggested that this may have been an anti-accessibility effort by the city. Between the spikes underneath bridges and superfluous arm rests in the middle of park benches, I wouldn’t put it above the city to do these kind of things just to be dicks to the less fortunate. But that couldn’t be right. Stairs in general are already wheelchair unfriendly, and the city doesn’t gain anything by being dicks to wheelchair folks. So, this didn’t make sense. What was the purpose of these oddly shaped stairs?

I’m first going to go over some stair terminology that I’ve adopted while doing research for this.

This is in accordance with the PITTSBURGH Citywide Steps Assessment PDF page 23 that I found on the internet.

From personal experience, I can affirm that walking down the stairs is quite a pain. Walking down these stairs requires two different types of leg actions at the tread. One step to first go up before the next step to go down by a disproportionate amount. This means you are essentially going in an oscillating motion, the walking equivalent of driving over speedbumps constantly. Your other option is to overstep the tread, which will require a wider step. This can be equally uncomfortable as now the spacing isn’t evenly distributed in a way that allows you to use alternating feet when going down steps. I guess the one praise is that if using the stairs normally, landing is spaced exactly the right distance so that your legs alternate when going down the stairs. Which distributes the stress on your knees more evenly. The landing measures around 120 cm, which for most people is enough for three steps, an odd number. This doesn’t mitigate the annoyingness of having to deal with the raised block between each flat platform.

On average, the step up to the tread (assuming you were walking down) is somewhere between 10 – 12 cm high. The subsequent fall is at least 14 cm and can even be as tall as 26 cm in some locations. Obviously, there’s a wide range of heights, the picture shown above was one of the tamer steps.

According to the PITTSBURGH Citywide Steps Assessment PDF, risers must be placed every 12 ft of elevation. Which these stairs fulfills. The treads should not have more than a 1.19° slope. Which I was not able to confirm since I did not have a digital level with me. But I suspect based off of visual inspection that the steps seemed more slanted than the acceptable guidelines. The maximum acceptable height for the riser is 7 in, or roughly 18 cm. I measured heights between steps as large as 26 cm in certain spots. So that’s not good. Other than that, the other mentioned conditions appear to be more or less met.

This so far has just been a little groundwork into where the stairs fall within the range of acceptable design. But I have not yet gotten to the bottom of why the stairs are shaped like that at all. I’m going to start by presenting some theories I have regarding the design that could provide potential reasoning. One of my initial thoughts was that it might have been one those empty frame-type stairs such as this one:

The idea behind these is that there is no flat surface tread. Instead, it’s just a blocker at the end to outline the shape of the stair. The center is then filled with dirt or pebbles to actually make the steps. There might be some evidence that this was the idea. Below are some more pictures I took at certain points along the stairs.

This is common in a lot of outdoor trails or hiking areas where it’s harder to construct solid concrete stairs that are fitted together. The US Federal Highway Administration has a page on trail construction and this was one of the diagrams showing these types of stairs. It’s very possible that these stairs I found fall under the category of the second stair type show in the image below.

Here, the “bumpy” appearance of the stairs appear less obvious, because the dirt and leaves appear to fill in the gap to sort of “level out” the steps.

I initially thought it was possible that in the earlier photos I showed at the top, there once was a lot of dirt or pebbles along all the landings but they were swept away by rain or wind. But that doesn’t seem very likely.

Revisiting these other parts of the stairs shows that they are very clearly above ground and there was no evidence that dirt had been on there at any point.

My second idea was that it was potentially an anti-slip effort. Being that the concrete blocks are on soil, and my previous comment about how the concrete blocks weren’t necessarily perfectly level, it’s very likely that they are a massive slipping hazard during the winter. Pittsburgh gets pretty cold, and iced floor is not uncommon. Having intermediate steps that bulge out can provide an extra stopping point in case someone loses control. At the very least it prevents types of slippage that occur at the “cliff” of the tread. This isn’t a perfect explanation because I think there are better ways to implement anti-slip measures without making the steps a huge inconvenience to walk down. What still struck me as odd was that I’ve never seen this stair design before. I wanted to know if this was common in areas around Pittsburgh.

I began my search by seeing if I could find other examples of this stair design in other places. This proved extremely difficult since I do not know the name of this style of stair or if there even was a name for these kinds of stairs. I used search terms like “stairs on hills with offset steps” or “odd stairs on hills” to try and find other examples of these kinds of stairs. This ended up not yielding much fruit, so I took a different approach instead. I searched “stair design fail reddit” since I was confident people are more likely to share and mock images of things they find to be erroneous. And would you know it.

This photo was from Reddit user u/kprincess who posted it to r/WTF. Perusing the comments reveals that this was probably not intentionally designed like this, but bad foundation and planning caused that section of the stairs to warp over time. Some users attributed it to soil creep. While this is indeed similar to the stairs I encountered, mine don’t look like the result of accidental environmental changes rather they look like they were intentionally built like that. So, I kept digging. But one thing was clear, the answer I was looking for is probably in Pittsburgh. Several comments in that post made mentions of how it reminded them of Pittsburgh. And I surely did find my set of stairs in Pittsburgh. Surely there must be more similar stairs in Pittsburgh for people to make that association. Rightfully so, because as it turns out, “Pittsburgh has more public staircases than any city in the United States” (https://pittsburghpa.gov/citysteps/). Pittsburgh seems to be not just the city of bridges, but also stairs. There’s entire blog posts and web pages dedicated to the various stairs and steps in the city of Pittsburgh such as Pittsburgh’s City Steps, A Pedestrian Guide to the Pittsburgh City Steps, City of Stairs, and THE LONGEST AND STEEPEST PITTSBURGH STEPS. I was not expecting to stumble into the Pittsburgh stair fandom today but here I am. Throughout my research, I found some cool websites that documents the stairs and steps in Pittsburgh such as this one (https://pittsburgh-steps.samlearner.com) that includes an interactive map that lists various sets of stairs in Pittsburgh as well as basic information like what material it’s made of or how many steps the stair has.

While this is cool information, still doesn’t give me further information on why these stairs are designed the way they were and whether they were unique in that aspect. Then finally I found this website: https://www.frontiernet.net/~rochballparks2/towns/pgh_steps.htm#beechv

This page contains photos of staircases from almost 30 neighborhoods throughout the Pittsburgh area and had hundreds of stairs photos. This was immensely useful to me as I was able to get an idea of all the various stair designs and note down common trends that start to pop up.

There’s predominantly two types of concrete stair designs that I noticed while scrolling through the page. Type one consist of these solid concrete stair blocks, which have a premade solid stair shaped profile.

Type two consisted of stairs that are made of separate concrete blocks that are laid across the surface of the ground and then joined together by a hand rail.

The difference in when the stair types are used is obvious. When the hill is less steep, it doesn’t make sense to use a sharp angle classical staircase profile. Instead, laying down longer and flatter treads incrementally would be a better use of resources. It makes sense really, it’s meant for scenarios where it’s too steep for a sidewalk, so you split it into steps.

But surprisingly, of the hundred plus pictures I scrolled through, I did not find any examples of the weird stair designs until I finally came across this:

These are the steps at Ray Avenue, the longest set of steps in Pittsburgh.

From this we can see that the raised middle tread is not an isolated incident. More pictures of these stairs can be found on this this blog. Having the attention of being the longest set of stairs in Pittsburgh, I would have thought there would be more commentary on this weird and unique design quirk used on the steps. But there really doesn’t appear to be much discussion on that design choice as far as I can tell. The Ray Ave raised middle treads don’t even seem as high as the ones I found.

I don’t really know how to end this. I feel like I had a point going in to all of this. But I think it was just an excuse for me to look at stairs and maybe read up on a little of Pittsburgh’s suburban architectural history. I didn’t get a good answer on why the stairs I found were the way they were. But hopefully someone else will come across this weirdly specific webpage and spark further discussion. So yeah, hope you enjoyed following along with this little dive into these weird set of stairs I came across.